If anarchism makes any empirical claim, it is that humans have the capacity, indeed the natural inclination, to organize themselves into networks of mutual aid: we do not need a government holding a gun to our head to compel socially beneficial behaviour. Rarely do we get an opportunity submit this hypothesis to a conclusive test,…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “Something Stinks in the Deodorant Debate” read by Dylan Delikta and edited by Nick Ford. Mass-production corporate capitalism is statist to the core — a creature of the state. And the kind of mass consumerism and market segmentation that results in 23 brands of deodorant is absolutely vital to the…

C4SS Feed 44 presents “We Are Market Forces” from the book Markets Not Capitalism, written by Charles Johnson, read by Stephanie Murphy and edited by Nick Ford. It’s convenient to talk about “market forces,” but you need to remember that remember that those “market forces” are not supernatural entities that act on people from the outside. “Market forces” are…

If you have even a shred of humanity, the answer is yes. Prisoners Richard Matt and David Sweat have dominated headlines for nearly two weeks after escaping from Dannemora, a maximum security prison in Upstate, New York. One prison employee, Joyce Mitchell, has been accused of providing them assistance in their escape. She too now,…

There is no doubt that the last twelve months have been a watershed period concerning the greater visibility of transgender, genderqueer, and other gender‑diverse people in both mainstream and social media. Two examples from recent times most readily spring ready to the mind. The actress Laverne Cox graced the front cover of the iconic Time…

Download a PDF copy of Mikayla Novak’s full C4SS Study: Gender Identity and Libertarianism Abstract People who do not identify with a gender status consistent with conventional fixed, binary gender stereotypes remain the target of a complex array of typically intertwining state policies and civil societal norms which greatly inhibit their liberties. Transgender and other gender-diverse…

In Free Market Fairness [1] John Tomasi lays out a way in which the gap between broadly libertarian (or classical liberal) and high liberal (or liberal egalitarian) political philosophies can be bridged. Since F. A. Hayek’s methodologically individualist rejection of the concept of social justice, and Robert Nozick’s liberty-based rejection of egalitarian distributive justice, there…

In a piece at Reason (“Bernie Sanders: Don’t Need 23 Choices of Deodorant, 18 Choices of Sneakers When Kids Are Going Hungry,” May 26), Ed Krayewski took Sen. Bernie Sanders to task for saying in a recent MSNBC interview: “You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we…

Young, I. M. (1990). Five Faces of Oppression. (E. Hackett, & S. Haslanger, Eds.) Theorizing Feminisms, 3-16. “Five Faces of Oppression” by Iris M. Young (1990) attempts to create an objective criteria by which we can judge the existence and levels of oppression of different groups. Young argues that oppression is a structural concept, preserved…

A 7.8 magnitude earthquake has devastated Nepal. Buildings, old and new, have crumbled. Older brick and wood homes are almost exclusively reduced to rubble. In an interview with The Guardian, Bhaskar Gautam, a local sociologist, describes the situation: “Outside Kathmandu it’s the rural poor. But in the city it’s the people in the older precarious housing. It’s…

We speak of the blowback that results from American foreign policy, the senseless, heinous acts of terror that represent an unfocused and irrational rebellion against American imperialism. We understand that calling it what it is, blowback — pointing out the causal relationship between American foreign policy and terrorism — is not an attempt to exculpate…

The Fulcrum of the Present Crisis: Some Thoughts on Revolutionary Strategy Center for a Stateless Society Paper No. 19 (Winter 2015) [PDF] The Cult of Mass, Lionization of Protest Culture & Other Industrial Age Holdovers Protest Culture. The so-called “cargo cults” of New Guinea, Micronesia and Melanesia evolved in response to the influx of American manufactured…

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (W.W. Norton & Company 2014), 320 pages. The subject of this book is the “second machine age,” in which “computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power — the ability to use our…

Usually when right-libertarians defend gentrification, they do so by framing it as an entirely spontaneous free market phenomenon, and minimizing or ignoring the state’s role in promoting it. That’s bad enough. But we don’t usually expect them to come out explicitly in favor of direct state intervention to evict poor people for the sake of…

David Graeber. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2015). This book is, properly speaking, not a book at all, but a collection of essays loosely clustered around the common theme of bureaucracy. Of the material in the book, only the long introductory essay…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Roderick Long‘s “A University Built by the Invisible Hand” read by Joey Clark and edited by Nick Ford. In the 12th century, Bologna was a center of intellectual and cultural life. Students came to Bologna from all over Europe to study with prominent scholars. These individual professors were not originally organized into a university;…